The 3D Printers, Scanners, And Art Robots Of Maker Faire Rome

November 2, 2019 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

How is it possible that a robot can sketch both better and worse than I can at the same time, and yet turn out an incredible work of art? Has 3D-scanning really come so far that a simple camera and motorized jig can have insane resolution? These are the kinds of questions that were running through my mind, and being answered by the creators of these brilliant machines, at Maker Faire Rome.

There was a high concentration of robots creating art and 3D printing on display and the Faire, so I saved the best examples just for this article. But you’ll also find hacks from a few groups of clever students, and hardware that made me realize industrial controllers can be anything but boring. Let’s take a look!

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Josef Prusa Wants You To Change File Formats

November 1, 2019 by Al Williams 65 Comments

We’ve all been there. You find that cool cat model on Thingiverse — we won’t judge. You download the STL, all ready to watch the magic of having it materialize on your print bed. But the slicer complains it isn’t manifold or watertight or something like that. What a let down. Part of this is due to shortcomings in the STL file format. There’s a newer format available, 3MF, and Josef Prusa and Jakub Kočí would like you to start using it.

STL — short for stereolithography — is a simple format that just holds a bunch of triangles. If you need any information about the part — like colors or materials. Worse still, as in our hypothetical example, there are no definition about how the triangles relate so you can create “bad” STL files. Even properly formed files can be tough to work with. You might scale for inches and the file is set for millimeters, for example.

Turns out 3MF is actually a ZIP archive and it can contain lots of information. The file can contain one or more models, colors, slicing data, copyrights, images, and lots more. The ZIP file is often shorter, too because of the compression. The big deal, though, is that the file format won’t allow nonmanifold models and removes ambiguity so that everything nicely prints. If your slicer stores data into the file — as the Prusa one does — other people using the same software can grab your settings, too.

The format isn’t really that new — it appeared around 2015 — but it hasn’t seen widespread adoption yet. Prusa encourages you to upload models in 3MF even if you also add an STL copy for people who haven’t made the switch yet.

So will you start using 3MF? Or are you already? The file format is open, they say. So if your favorite tool doesn’t like 3MF, you could always add support for it yourself.

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Stereolithography Goes Big

October 31, 2019 by Al Williams 14 Comments

When it comes to hobby-level 3D printing, most of us use plastic filament deposited by a hot end. Nearly all the rest are using stereolithography — projecting light into a photosensitive resin. Filament printers have typical build volumes ranging from 1,000 to 10,000 cubic centimeters and even larger isn’t unusual. By contrast, SLA printers are often much smaller. A 1,200 CC SLA printer is typical and the cheaper printers are sometimes as little as 800 CCs. Perhaps that’s why [3D Printing Nerd] (otherwise known as [Joel]) was excited to get his hands on a Peopoly Phenom which has a build area of over 17,000 CCs. You can see the video review, below.

He claims that it is even bigger than a Formilab 3L, although by our math that has a build volume of around 20,000 CCs. On the other hand, the longest dimension on the Peopoly is 40 cm which is 6.5 cm longer than the 3L, so maybe that’s what he means. Either way, the printer is huge. That’s nearly 16 inches which is big even for a filament printer. Regardless of which one is bigger, the Peopoly is certainly much less expensive coming in at around $1,800 versus the 3L’s almost $10,000 price tag.

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Fresh-Squeezed OJ Served In Orange Peel-Ay

October 31, 2019 by Kristina Panos 25 Comments

Though it’s really more apple cider weather here at Hackaday HQ, freshly-squeezed OJ is a treat that knows no season. Sure generates a lot of peel, though. Not something you think about when you’re used to buying it in jugs at the grocery store. What a waste, huh?

Italian design firm [Carlo Rotti] teamed up with global energy company [Eni] to develop “Feel the Peel”, a 10-foot-tall real-time juice bar that celebrates the orange by using the entire thing. Fifteen hundred juicy orbs move single-file down the circular track toward their total destruction. One at a time, they are severed in half and wrung out by the machine, and their peels are dropped into a clear bin for all to see. Once the peels dry out, they are shredded, mixed with PLA, and fed into a delta printer that prints juice cups right there on site.

This live process of reuse is pretty interesting to watch — check it out after the break. [Eni] touts this as completely circular, but that really depends on what happens to the cups. If they collect the empties and compost them, great. Anyway, it seems way more sustainable than the Juicero.

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3D Scanner For Tiny Objects Uses Blu-Ray Parts

October 30, 2019 by Lewin Day 13 Comments

There’s plenty of different methods to build a 3D scanner, with photogrammetry being a particularly accessible way to do it. This involves taking a series of photos from different angles to build up the geometry of the model. If you want to do this with something small, instead of a camera, just substitute a microscope! [NoseLace’s] LadyBug does just that.

It’s a 3D scanner built in a very hacker fashion. The X-Y stage that moves the sample is from a KES-400a Blu-Ray drive, salvged from the original “fat” Playstation 3. The Z axis is then created using the linear stepper motor from the optical pickup of the same drive. A rotary stepper motor is added on to the Z-axis to allow the sample to be rotated. It’s all combined with a basic USB microscope to take the images, and a Raspberry Pi which handles running all the stepper motors with some add-on driver boards.

[NoseLace] uses the device to create 3D models of insects, but it would work just as well with other small objects. The benefit of this approach is that it creates both the 3D model and the requisite texture, too. There’s plenty of open-source tools available if you’d like to try it for yourself. Video after the break.

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Peep These Ultra-Real 3D-Printed Eyeballs

October 29, 2019 by Kristina Panos 10 Comments

For humans, life is in the eyes. Same deal with automatons. The more realistic the eyes, the more lifelike (and potentially disturbing) the automaton is. [lkkalebob] knows this. [lkkalebob] is so dedicated to ocular realism in his ultra-real eyeballs that he’s perfected a way to make the minuscule veins from a whisper of cotton thread.

First he prints an eyeball blank out of ABS. Why ABS, you ask? It has a semi-translucence that makes it look that much more real. Also, it’s easier to sand than PLA. After vigorous sanding, it’s time to paint the iris and the apply the veins. [lkkalebob] shaves strands of lint from red cotton thread and applies it with tweezers to smears of super glue.

Here comes our favorite part. To make the whole process easier, [lkkalebob] designed a jig system that takes the eyeballs all the way through the stages of fabrication and into the sockets of the automaton. The hollow eye cups pressure fit on to prongs that hold it in place. This also gives the eyeball a shaft that can be chucked into a drill for easy airbrushing. In the build video after the break, he uses the eye-jig to cast a silicone mold, which he then uses to seal the eyes in resin.

Don’t have a printer or any desire to make human automata? It doesn’t take much to make mesmerizing mechanisms.

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Perler Printer Pushes Pixel-Art Like No Sprite Artist Could

October 23, 2019 by Sonya Vasquez 12 Comments

There’s something oddly soothing about the practice of laying down Perler Beads on a casual weekend to make your favorite classic Nintendo characters. But seriously, why use our grubby hands like a caveman when we could leverage a machine to do the heavy-lifting for us? That’s exactly what [knezuld11] did! They’ve built a 64-color Bead Sprite Printer including an automatic cooking feature for fusing the result. (Video, embedded below.)

From the top, up to 64 unique bead colors are stashed into cartridges at the top. A bulk agitator does the work of passing these beads into tubes for the lower-stage bead selector. At this level, beads colors are serialized into a single tube that feeds into the output “nozzle.” The entire process of directing the bead pattern is driven by a Python script that takes images as input and approximates their colors to the available bead palette. When the bead “printing” is done, the machine ramps up its heated bed and cooks the bottoms of the beads, fusing them together in a way that [knezuld11] says works actually better than the typical ironing method.

We simply love how feature-complete this system is. While [knezuld11] mentioned that the Bead Sprite Printer was an attempt at beating a world record, we imagine that there are dozens of other ways this machine could lead to some whimsical engagements. Quite frankly, we’d love to see this machine at an Artist Alley making on-demand art.

If you managed to spill all your beads from sheer excitement watching this video, fret not! This automatic bead sorter from our past is just the thing to help you out.

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